Generational change
Multiple narrative voices and vivid descriptions bring this immigrants’ tale to life.
If you read only the first 70 pages of The One Who Wrote Destiny, you might wonder what hit you. Is this going to be an icky rom-com? In 1966, young Mukesh is a Gujarati who travels to England from Kenya, where he was born. He aims to go to Swinging London. Instead he’s stuck in a drab northern town. Worse, he’s nerdy and gawky and hasn’t a hope of winning lovely Nisha, the girl for whom he pines.
But fate steps in. First, he gets the plum role of Lord Rama in the Diwali-season play that Nisha is directing. Then he helps Nisha see off a bunch of English yobbos (called “Paki-bashers” in those days) who try to smash up the play. Nisha now thinks he’s a hero.
So nerd trounces thugs and wins girl. You can’t get more rom-com than that, can you? But the author, Nikesh Shukla, is up to something far cleverer. Mukesh’s heroic story is the sunny version he tells his children years later, when he’s doing the “how-I-met-your-mother” routine. And it is simply the entrée to a novel with a far more nuanced, less upbeat, view of immigrant life.
Shukla, a regular Guardian columnist, wrote the 2010 novel Coconut Unlimited, about hip-hop devotees. His biggest splash to date was editing the essay collection
The Good Immigrant, in which a formidable list of immigrant authors argued that, in Britain, you are accepted by
Anglo society only if you are the “good” immigrant who achieves something extraordinary. Ordinary honest plodders are not welcome.
The One Who Wrote Destiny picks up on this theme as it goes through three generations of an immigrant family. In the 2000s, Mukesh’s daughter, Nehah, wants to integrate, refuses to learn the Gujarati language and buries herself in computer tech. Mukesh’s son, Rakesh, aims to be a standup comic, but is not always sure whether his ethnic routines make white audiences more accepting of Gujarati life or simply reinforce their prejudices. Then there’s a long flashback to their grandmother’s days in Kenya, where similar ethnic tensions show themselves.
What gives The One Who Wrote Destiny the edge, though, is the way Shukla refuses to let it become a string of slogans. Familiar themes of prejudice, homesickness and cultural differences between generations do get an airing. But the key is the way immigrants and their children conceive of their identity and question how they got to be who they are. They often refer to fate and destiny.
So who is “the one who wrote destiny”? God? Nature? Genes? (The novel has an important plot strand about a fatal disease running through a family.) Or does our destiny consist of those inherited family customs and traditions and attitudes that shape us and over which we have little control?
The One Who Wrote Destiny has its outbursts of rough-house satire, but its backbone is Shukla’s clever use of many narrative voices and his ability to paint in vivid colours the life of a particular community.
So nerd trounces thugs and wins girl. You can’t get more rom-com than that, can you?